Britain, Europe and a referendum

In the late 1960s, young students such as myself supported the Common Market (as it was then known), and Britain’s membership of it, for a mixture of reasons, but mainly for political and cultural ones. If post-World War II peace was to survive, then Western Europe needed some degree of economic and political unity that monitored Germany; the US needed an allied bloc to set against the Eastern European nations that by then were firmly in the communist bloc; and economic recovery from dismal austerity required expanding markets and greater movements of people and skills.

However, many of the original motives became perverted and obscured, the EU was born as a child of post-war positivism and liberalism and naive faith in Western democracy as a bulwark against the demonstrably “failed states” of Germany, Italy, Spain and parts of Eastern Europe.

However, in the period that the Common Market evolved into the present EU, three major tendencies cemented into an agenda that drastically moved it away from such simple faiths and visions, and that has recently lead to the harsh treatment of debtor systems from Cyprus to Greece to Spain, and are likely to soon extend to Italy and several of the new-member nations, the latter of whom tend to promise many things more in hope than with conviction.

First, the EU is ruled by the economic ideology of the so-called “troika” of Germany, the IMF and the European Bank, which tends to see everything in terms of market economics. Thus, the loose Euro-migration policies are not children of radical sympathies for migrants and their needs, but merely aspects of the logic of markets — if goods and capital and knowledge markets are unrestricted within Europe, then labor markets must also be.

This is the logic behind the “liberal” profile for migration under Smithian classical economic assumptions that migrants add to the labor market. Competition in that market thereby represents an optimization of use of labor and this happens best if labor freely moves from job to job, skill to skill, location to location. This does not speak to local communities, notions of cultural and political identity, or worker solidarity, nor to the location of special welfare regimes for poor workers, the unskilled or unemployed within particular nations. Anti-EU votes in Britain could be seen as a refusal of this theorizing and its social outcomes.

Second, the dominant central political parties have moved firmly right in the past 20 years in the US, UK, France, Germany and elsewhere, and the British referendum result could be seen as a rejection of major parties and a move toward extremes, minorities and a rat-bag collection of competing and often contradictory policies and perspectives. For instance, the “exit” groups in the UK have bought into temporary alliance people who seriously dislike each other and could not be ever visualized as belonging in the future to one party central to UK politics.

Third, to an extent the vote is a rejection of globalism and financialism, the rhetoric of austerity, which has often merely disguised regressive policies of low taxation, low expenditure, and low innovation — thus combining failing social services with low-growth economies — in order to protect the livelihoods or extreme wealth of financial groupings, investors and bankers, in what might be called the post-1971 perspective of the IMF and of the EU.

WHO: Britain,European

WHAT: a referendum about England leaving Europe Union or not

WHEN: in June, last year

WHERE: British

WHY: because Britain thought they were ruled by EU too much

HOW: by voting

KEYWORDS:

1. bloc (n.) 集團;陣營(指具有類似政治利益的國家或人的群體)

2. dismal (adj.) 悲傷絕望的

3. austerity (n.) 艱苦/節儉

4. pervert (v.) 歪曲

5. cement (v.) 加強/鞏固

6. bulwark (n.) 保障

7. labor market (n.) 勞工市場

8. regime (n.) 政權/政體

9. referendum (n.) (重大決議的)全民公投

10. alliance (n.) 同盟國/聯盟

REFERENCE:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2016/06/27/2003649550